These jelly - comparable blobs , seen along beaches on the East Coast of the United States , look quite like man-of-war . However , they ’re not . They are salps , and they harmlessly wash away up on shore in clod in   the summertime .

Sometimes refer to as “ jellyfish eggs , ”   salps are in reality not related to   jellyfish at all . The only unwashed features between salps and jellyfish are that they are both gelatinous and both float in the ocean , saidLarry Madin , executive frailty president and director of research at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts , speaking to National Geographic .

Salps aretunicatesand have a sort of backbone , which jellyfish do not have .

While small - sized salp are sight often on beaches , there are actually about50 specie of salpnative to all parts of the world . They can grow to be up to 30 centimetre long ( 1 infantry ) .

And they have an strange means of reproduction . They canbud asexually , which means that one salp can make a connected chain of hermaphroditic clones . Sometimes reaching lengths of up to 15 meters farsighted ( 50 feet ) , these chains form in different pattern , such as a wheel or a treble coil chain .

When these salp chains do break aside , the individuals twist into female with one egg each , which are fertilized by   male of premature coevals to produce an embryo . While the embryo get deep down , the mother salp then grow testes to fertilize other ball from other generations until her baby salp is born and the round carry on .

The salpa ’s cloning and reproduction arrangement is very prompt , say Madin , and the result genetic material soup keeps the salp ’s populations healthy .

salp voraciously wipe out algae blooms for hang on in cloning . The specific alga that they ingest uses carbon dioxide to grow . So when the salp exhaust the alga , they also eat all of   that tasty gas , too . Pooping out declamatory fecal pellets that sink to the bottom of the sea means that the salp effectively remove carbon from the C cycle .

" It ’s one way of trying to balance out how much CO2is in the atmosphere , " said Montclair State University ’s director of the maritime biological science and coastal scientific discipline programme Paul Bologna to National Geographic .

So these small jellylike blobs could even be helpful in combating mood modification .

[ H / T : National Geographic ]